French police raids Nvidia offices amid antitrust investigation: Report

Nvidia, one of many world leaders in synthetic intelligence (AI) chip manufacturing with headquarters in California, reportedly confronted a police raid in its French places of work this week. The motion got here as part of a basic inquiry of French antitrust authorities into the cloud computing sector. 

On Sept. 28, the Wall Road Journal reported the raid, though neither Nvidia nor the French enforcement companies have formally commented on what occurred.

A press launch on the webpage of the French antitrust company, the Autorité de la Concurrence, refers to an unannounced inspection within the graphics playing cards sector. Based on the discharge, a decide licensed the raid on the premise of the corporate “having carried out anticompetitive practices within the graphics playing cards sector.”

Nonetheless, the raid itself doesn’t “pre-suppose the existence of a breach of the regulation, which could possibly be imputed to the corporate,” because the message from the company specifies.

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Autorité de la Concurrence refers to its personal opinion, issued in conclusion to a year-long examine of the cloud computing sector. Printed in June 2023, this doc doesn’t point out Nvidia. As an alternative it focuses on different tech firms, specifically the three hyper scalers” — Amazon Internet Providers (AWS), Google Clou,d and Microsoft Azure. Based on the company’s knowledge, they characterize 80% of the spending progress in public cloud infrastructures and purposes in France in 2021:

“Amazon and Microsoft have captured 46% and 17% respectively of revenues from IaaS and PaaS providers in 2021. Given their monetary capacities and their digital ecosystems, these hyperscalers are ready to hinder competitors growth.”

The company is contemplating varied choices offered by the nationwide competitors legal guidelines and the European Knowledge Act to fight this tendency. 

Nvidia inevitably comes below the regulators’ consideration attributable to its distinctive place because the {hardware} producer for essentially the most revolutionary sectors of the digital business. The corporate’s current quarterly report revealed that the US regulators requested it to curb exports of AI chips to “some Center East nations.” A day later, the US Division of Commerce denied this info.